Beneficial plant constituents as building blocks for pharmaceuticals
Plants are loaded with beneficial substances, from pharmaceuticals to molecules for making ‘plastic’ bottles. But such substances must be identified, extracted, and sometimes amended. Scientists of Plant Research International are working hard on this and have already been successful.
About half of the pharmaceutical products originate from plants or are based on a plant constituent. Our researchers are specifically looking for new substances that can serve as medicine. They are, e.g., together with doctors, chemists and clinical scientists investigating various substances against cancer. Human medical science has shown that certain proteins are involved in this disease. Our scientists are testing components from various plants for their effectiveness against cancer where they are looking for plant constituents that kill cancer cells without damaging normal cells.
The researchers are also investigating whether substances may be involved in the prevention of cancer. Any possibly suitable substance is tested in an animal as well as in an alternative test system. Our scientists are only carrying out the plant part of this research.
New applications
Our scientists are not only making new pharmaceuticals but they are also developing new types of potato starch. For more than 20 years they are already studying the composition of starch granules and how these can be changed for application in unconventional ways. And they have made quite some progress. They are working on starch with a resistance to certain enzymes, e.g., to prevent starch from being decomposed. This would be useful for diet products: anyone eating such products cannot absorb the sugar from the starch into his/her body. For animal feed, however, full starch decomposition would be quite useful to let the animals fully utilise the feed. And our scientists are also working on starch with a good freezing and thawing resistance.
Our scientists are also extracting molecules from plants to let these serve as building blocks for recyclable bottles and for replacement of plastic bottles.